Guru Investment Theses on Western Digital Corp

FPA Capital Comments on Western Digital - Jul 29, 2013

The best performing stock this year for the Fund is Western Digital (WDC), which appreciated 47.5% and closed at over $62. We have written about WDC in the past, but, as a reminder, the company is the largest manufacturer of hard disk drives (HDDs) used to store information. The Fund initially purchased WDC in 2007 in the mid- teens and then added substantially to the position during the financial crisis when the stock traded as low as $10 a share in 2009.

WDC has been among our largest weightings over the past year, when the stock was trading in the low $30s. The stock was very cheap, trading then at less than 5x earnings, primarily because investors were focused on the company's revenue exposure to the declining desktop and notebook computer sectors, which are being challenged by tablets and other mobile devices. We focused on the entire product spectrum, which included enterprise drives that generate 3x more revenue per unit than PC drives and also have higher profit margins. As businesses and individuals shift more of their computing and storage requirements to cloud-based architectures, the vast majority of that information resides, and will continue to reside, on HDDs. WDC supplies various types of enterprise HDDs, but is very focused on the particularly fast-growing market niche of nearline storage products. We are optimistic about WDC's earnings potential this year. Thus, with currently about $9 per share in net cash per share, we believe WDC has good growth potential. Nonetheless, we have trimmed back our position, given the stock's substantial appreciation, in order to keep the weighting at a desired level and to reflect the new risk-to-reward ratio at these higher prices.

Top Ranked Articles about Western Digital Corp

The capacity drive industry is a duopoly with Western Digital (WDC) and Seagate Technology (STX) leading the way. Both organizations were on an equivalent balance a year ago with a 43% offer of the hard-plate drive, or HDD market. In any case, Western Digital has hurried ahead with a 45% offer, while Seagate lingers behind with 40% of the business sector. Also focused around a couple of basic presumptions, I think this hole could enlarge further. Read more...

Business Description

Western Digital Corp a Delaware corporation was founded in 1970. The Company is a developer, manufacturer and provider of data storage solutions that enable consumers, businesses, governments and other organizations to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. The Company's product portfolio includes hard disk drives ("HDDs") and solid-state drives ("SSDs"). The HDDs are primary storage medium for digital content, with the use of solid-state storage products. The Company's products are marketed under the HGST, WD and G-Technology brand names and operate its business through subsidiaries. Its HDDs provide non-volatile data storage, which means that the data remains present when power is no longer applied to the device. Its SSDs use semiconductor, non-volatile media, rather than magnetic media and magnetic heads, to store and allow fast access to data without any moving parts. The Company through its subsidiary delivers high performance 10,000/15,000 revolutions per minute ("RPM") drives targeting server and storage system OEMs, enterprise capacity drives for bulk storage applications for both hyperscale cloud customers and OEMs, helium sealed 6 terabyte ("TB") products that improve capacity and other dimensions of total cost of ownership, mobile drives for the notebook, PC and gaming markets, and a G-Technology line of branded products for professional audiovisual users. In addition it delivers a line of SSDs for the high end of the performance market that includes 2.5" Serial Attached SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) ("SAS") drives as well as Peripheral Component Interconnect Express ("PCIe") SSDs for the server market and embedded flash solutions. It also designs, manufacturers and provides hard drives for range of digital storage uses, from PCs and data centers to home video recorders and home network storage devices; and also packages these hard drives into consumer appliances, which offer portable, desktop and personal cloud storage for accessibility from anywhere and sharing functionality, as well as provide media playing devices to simplify enjoyment of personal content on televisions. The Company's Enterprise storage products consist of HDDs and SSDs for performance enterprise and capacity enterprise markets. Its enterprise storage solutions include performance drives which are optimized for performance applications. Within performance drives it offers factor drives which provide high capacity storage, primarily for data storage systems, and small form factor drives which provide a range of capacity and performance levels primarily for use in enterprise servers, supporting high volume on-line transactions, data analysis and other enterprise applications. The Company also offers Client: Desktop and Notebook PCs including Client compute solutions consist of HDDs for desktop and mobile PCs; Branded Product Solutions consist of HDDs embedded into WD-, HGST- and G-Technology-branded external storage applian

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